Is crowd-sourcing the future of science and nature documentaries?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMxuocCN1O0

Thanks to the web everything’s being crowd-sourced–from encyclopedias (see Wikipedia) to science (see FoldIt) to journalism (see iReport) to political campaigns (see Obama’s, 2008). So it was only a matter of time before filmmakers caught the zeitgeist and started producing crowd-sourced documentaries.

The most ambitious such project, from director Ridley Scott, debuted last Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. “Life in a Day” is a 94-minute film that documents the lives of regular people across the globe. Shot by amateur filmmakers at different times and on different continents, the film was edited down and arranged into the chronology of a single day.

Filmmakers submitted their video clips via YouTube, who co-produced the film. On July 24th of last year, the one day amateur  filmmakers could upload their videos, YouTube  received 80,000  submissions from 140 nations  for a total of 4,500 hours of footage. (I feel for the interns who had sift through all of  that–and you know it was interns.)

Early reviews of the film seem to be mixed. Christie Nicholson,  a colleague speaking at Sundance caught an advance screening and wrote on her twitter page:

“LIFE IN A DAY is a spectacular movie. Words are inadequate. A must see.”

Despite widespread attention from the media, “Life in the Day” isn’t the first or only crowd-sourced documentary.  In fact, a nature doc titled  “Love the Earth Film”  debuted late last year and was cobbled together from 1000 submissions from more than 100 filmmakers globally. Musician Imogen Heap spear-headed the film and she previewed the piece  at a November 5th concert accompanied by a live orchestra playing her score.

But it’s unclear if “Love the Earth Film” will ever see commercial distribution.  Ms. Heap hasn’t announced further plans for the film and the promotional website  has effectively been abandoned. “Life in a Day”, on the other hand, has already been picked up by National Geographic Films.

So is this the wave of the future or just a gimmick? If the former, when will we see the first commercially-successful crowd-sourced science or nature documentary? What will it look like?  After all, we’re so accustomed  to big-money, blue-chip science and nature documentaries will we (or distributors for that matter) accept a film with poor lighting, shaky camera shots and bad audio but with the largest camera crew ever assembled?

And the bigger question is who might be able to pull this off? “Life in Day” and even less ambitious projects like “Love the Earth Film” both had big name talent as a draw. Could a lesser-known filmmaker get enough quality submissions to make a go at this? Or would it take someone with the last name Attenborough or Cousteau to make it happen?